Beautiful Creatures: Book Review

The Beautiful Creatures series, by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, is a fantastic series about 17 year old, Ethan Wate who lives in the small town of Gatlin, South Carolina with his father and housekeeper, Amma.

The start of Ethan’s junior year comes with a lot of chaos. He has recurring dreams about a young girl that he does not know. Every night he wakes up to the smell of lemon and rosemary. Once at school he finds the surprising news that there will be a new girl that year. Ethan’s small town rarely ever gets new people. Even weirder is that the new girl is Macon Melchizedek Ravenwood’s, the town shut-in, niece Lena Ravenwood.

On Ethan’s way home, he almost runs Lena over while she’s trying to find help for her broken down car. The moment he smells the rosemary and lemon he instantly realizes that Lena is the girl from his dreams. After fighting for the chance to get to know Lena, he learns that she is a “Caster”, a person who can use magic, and on her sixteenth birthday she will have to be claimed for Light or Dark. Ethan tries to help Lena from going to the Dark as well as how he is connected to her. Later they discover that they are somehow connected through the years of Caster history.

The rest of the series tells about the struggles both Lena and Ethan face going into Lena’s sixteenth birthday and after she was claimed.  The series is an amazing read that keeps you on your toes through each and every book. It goes into great detail about Gatlin life as well as the odd life of a Caster.

Urbana High School Senior, Vanessa Rumsey, say’s “Beautiful Creatures is an amazing read. It keeps you interested throughout the whole story and makes you want the next book right then and there.”

This series consists of four books, Beautiful Creatures, Beautiful Darkness, Beautiful Chaos, and Beautiful Redemption. Each and every book continues the story of Ethan and Lena as they go through good times and bad.

The first book, Beautiful Creatures, recently came out in film on February 14. It stars Alden Ehrenreich as Ethan Wate and Alice Englert as Lena Duchannes. The movie follows the book fairly well and keeps you on your toes.